Recently in Civil Engineering Category

In one corner of a huge civil engineering laboratory on campus, Dr. Ronaldo Luna watches a machine shake silt from the Mississippi River until it liquefies.

“This is what would happen during a major earthquake along the Mississippi River,” Luna says.

Researchers don’t fully understand the liquefaction process for silts (they have a better understanding of how it works with sands), but Luna is confident, based on his tests, that a 6.5 magnitude earthquake or bigger would cause solid surfaces along the banks of the Mississippi River to turn, momentarily, into liquid.

This would be very bad. Read the full story here.

UMR is one of four universities slated to receive $3 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation for new research, the DoT announced late last week. The allocation is part of an $18.5 million in transportation research funding for 13 U.S. universities through DoT's Research and Innovative Technology Administration.

Speaking of UMR transportation research, be sure to tune in the PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on Monday night to catch some of UMR's transportation researchers discuss their work and the state of the nation's infrastructure.

If my high school science class took field trips like the one I went on yesterday afternoon, I might have enjoyed class a bit more.

Yesterday Genda Chen and Jason Baird (experts in structures and explosives, respectively) invited me to join them for a trip out to a range at Fort Leonard Wood. I'll share more details about the research in another post, but suffice it to say, it's hard to beat an afternoon spent blowing things up.

Here's what I learned:

1. There's a lot of paperwork involved with transporting explosives.
2. C4 sort of smells like Play-Doh and motor oil.
3. Using "det cords" instead of detonators helps make the explosives fire all at once.
4. A sheet of fiber-reinforced polymer and a layer of rubber-like material can help strengthen and confine concrete columns so they don't disintegrate.
5. Blowing stuff up is fun (but really, I already knew that).

A reusable crash barrier developed by UMR Chancellor John F. Carney has made an impact on highway safety over the years. Now, the chancellor's invention is being cited as an example of university research that helps make the world a better place.

The chancellor's cylindrical crash cushions -- like the ones pictured here, at a St. Louis exit ramp -- are among the 100 university research projects described in The Better World Report, Part Two: Technology Transfer Works: 100 Innovations from Academic Research to Real-World Application.

The report is published by the Better World Project, an undertaking of the non-profit Association of University Technology Managers. Released in April, the report "shows how technology transfer -- the process of licensing and commercializing academic research -- improves people’s lives, contributes to the economy and supports tomorrow's discoveries,” says AUTM President John Fraser.

Carney's work also caught the notice of The Kansas City Star, which reported on the citation over the weekend.